16. Biskupin; A World of Wood Stolen by the Nazis

In 1933 Walenty Szwajcer, a local teacher on a trip to Lake Biskupin in Poland, noticed timbers in the lake. The following year Professor Józef Kostrzewski began a series of excavations that uncovered a large Iron Age settlement built of timber preserved in marshland at the edge of the lake. As more of the site was revealed, it became apparent that the scale of the find and its exceptional preservation made this one the greatest discoveries in the history of archaeology. The Poles were naturally pretty chuffed, and, sandwiched between Hitler and Stalin, they hadn’t got much else to be chuffed about in the late 1930s.

A plan of the settlement at Biskupin

15. Living in lakes and other perennial problems

Throughout Prehistoric Europe settlements were built on artificial islands in lakes. These varied in size from small towns to individual houses. These islands were usually constructed from timber piles and built up with local materials such as tree trunks, brushwood, clay, and stones. These artificial island settlements are known as ‘crannógs’ in Ireland and Scotland, where they are common in the Iron Age.

A modern reconstruction of an Iron Age crannóg on Loch Tay, Scotland [1].